


Whistle and I'll Come to You

by pharis



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Gen, Halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 03:42:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4988899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pharis/pseuds/pharis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bad phone connection leads to a difficult case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whistle and I'll Come to You

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in October 2009.

For the fourth time in ten minutes, the phone on the shared desk rang. Starsky leaned over, almost doubling in half to snag the receiver without moving his heels from where they were propped up on the end of the table. He tucked the receiver under his chin without looking away from the file he held.

“Bay City P.D., Homicide,” he said wearily. “Hello?” He listened for a moment and then hung up without a word. Hutch looked at him inquiringly.

“Static again. Wish they’d get that thing fixed.” The phone had always rung through to the bullpen when the switchboard was busy, but it had been happening all day, and Barbara said she wasn’t getting the calls. They were the only two in the room at the moment, with most of the other second-shift guys out.

Hutch closed his own file and set it on the stack between them. “You about done?”

“I got nothing. Anybody you like?”

Hutch picked up two files that remained in front of them and tapped the spines on the desk. “Herman Ziller and Tiffany. I think she’s our best bet.”

“Seventh Street it is.” Starsky jumped up, relieved, and grabbed his jacket from the hook on the way out. It was only eight in the evening, probably too early to find Tiffany at work, but he was antsy today. As the door closed behind Hutch, the phone rang again. Hutch turned, but Starsky put an arm across his shoulder and tried to steer him back down the hallway.

“Let it ring through to Dispatch, okay?” That static creeped him out.

“No, that won’t do. You know something’s wrong with the line -- what if it doesn’t go through?”

“You get it, then.” Starsky waited in the empty hall, kicking moodily at the legs of the bench. “Stupid phones,” he muttered.

Hutch reappeared almost immediately. “Static,” he said shortly. “Let’s go.”

***

Tiffany turned out to be exactly the lead they needed. One of the thieves was a customer of hers -- a new regular, flashing money and treating Tiffany to drinks and coke. But he had a temper, too, and she was eager enough to point out his car for a hundred bucks. By midnight, Starsky and Hutch were back at the station, perp booked and paperwork done.

“And that,” Starsky said as he pulled the report out of the typewriter, “is why we treat the working girls right.”

Carol, waiting to take the report from him, rolled her eyes and smiled. “I don’t think I want to know.”

The phone rang, and Carol picked up. “Bay City Police Department.” She frowned. “I can’t hear you. Could you repeat that?”

Starsky sat up, staring at her. She mouthed, “ _Static_ ,” and then said into the phone, “Please speak up.”

Starsky gestured for the phone. “It’s been ringing off the hook. Let me have it.” He pressed the receiver tight up against his ear and closed his eyes, listening hard. He felt Hutch sidle up close and tilt his head to try to hear too. No good. It was the same static he’d heard before -- not the soft white noise of a television channel that was off the air, but a hissing, popping sound that set his teeth on edge. “Are you there?” he said.

There. Something like a voice, a single syllable out of context.  _Eee_ , or maybe  _me_. He met Hutch’s gaze and shook his head. Hutch took the receiver and listened. “Hello?” He waited another minute, then shrugged and held it out so they could all hear the dial tone.

Carol spoke up. “I was sure I heard a voice, but I couldn’t make out anything.”

“That’s not a short circuit, then. Someone’s been calling all night. Dammit!”

Hutch was on another phone already, getting authorization for a trace.

***

But now that they were waiting, the phone was silent. Hutch caught up on paperwork, and Carol went back downstairs.

Starsky paced. He picked up the phone to check the dial tone, then put it down, convinced Miss  _Eee_  was trying to call at that exact instant. Poked at the receiver to be sure it was hung up solidly. Paced some more.

At one-thirty it rang again. Starsky was across the room and almost tripped over a chair trying to get to it before Hutch did. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt like it was  _his_  call. They’d hung up when Hutch got on the line before, anyway.

Static. It made him think of cold wind and branches tapping on the window. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“... me.” Definitely a kid, maybe a girl.

Hutch was in the background, speaking sharply to somebody at the phone company.  _Oh, Hutch, don’t piss them off_ , Starsky thought. The phone hissed in his ear.

“This is the police station. Where are you?” Starsky spoke loud and slow.

Quite clearly, the kid said, “They died.” The phone clicked to silence, then to a dial tone.

***

At four, Hutch convinced him to go home. “Buddy, we’ve been on for twelve hours. Let’s save the heroics for when we have a case, huh?” There had been two more phone calls routed to the squad room that night, one domestic and one liquor store holdup. The night shift guys had taken care of them while Starsky sat and stared at the phone.

The streets were empty and slightly foggy with the last shreds of summer warmth. Starsky stared blankly out the passenger window as they rolled home at Hutch’s sedate pace. When they pulled up at his apartment, he didn’t get out right away.

Hutch spoke quietly. “If day shift gets the trace, they’ll call us.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Maybe it’s nothing. A prank call.”

Starsky glanced over. No, Hutch didn’t believe that either.

***

For the next two nights, the static-filled calls continued. They definitely weren’t coming through the main switchboard, and the phone repairman couldn’t figure out where the glitch was. Starsky made out “scared,” “they died,” and, he thought, “it got dark.” And “help me,” over and over. Sometimes he talked, figuring maybe the connection was better from that end.  _We’ll get you out_ , he said to the wall of static.  _And then we’ll go to the zoo. You like the zoo? I like giraffes_. Dial tone, connection lost.

Finally, one afternoon just after their shift began, they got a break. The line seemed a little clearer than it had before, and Starsky held the kid on the line for seven minutes -- most of it static, but he was almost sure they had a real exchange at least once. He’d asked “Where are you?” and got “Downstairs” -- which, while it was spectacularly unhelpful from an adult perspective, would make perfect sense to a four- or five-year-old. But the static had gotten worse then, cutting between low screeches and an ominous ticking sound, and when Starsky had asked “Who are you with?” over and over, the answer -- “summer” -- had made no sense at all. Maybe the kid couldn’t hear him after all.

It didn’t matter, though, because Carol gave a thumbs-up from the other desk. He handed the phone off to Dobey and headed for the door. Hutch met him there, shrugging into his jacket while handing Starsky his, holding a slip of paper in his teeth. Thirty seconds later the Torino was peeling out of the parking lot, heading for an address in the hills just north of town.

***

“Ohhhh, Hutch. This gives me the creeps.”

Number 5 Alexander Fleming Drive was not a house. It was a small prep school, a rambling stone structure that might once have been a movie star’s mansion but had clearly been converted into a public building, with parking around the side. The ghosts of letters over the main entrance spelled out “Campbell Academy.”

“Carol’s note said the number was out of service.”

“I can see that.”

The place was dead. A corner of the roof was missing, and everywhere black soot flared up from empty window sockets. The plywood covering the windows and doors was gray with age and half overgrown with vines.

Hutch had his gun out and was poking cautiously at the plywood over a window. He tented his fingers and pushed, and the whole sheet fell in with a whump of dust. Hutch looked at Starsky and tilted his head in invitation, then stepped in over the low sill. Starsky took a quick look back at the comforting brightness of the Torino and followed.

It was dim, and quiet, and as far as they could tell, completely empty. They paced through the building, upstairs rooms that had been bedrooms and tiny classrooms downstairs, stripped of furniture and full of dust. Two rooms on the upper floor were badly fire-damaged, and the boards of the temporary roof had warped some to let in the weather. Starsky opened every closet door on the ground floor twice, convinced that there must be a basement level, and they walked around the outside of the building, looking for outside stairs or even a coal chute. Nothing.

Hutch went back to the car to get in touch with Carol, see whether there had been a mistake in the address. Starsky stood on the overgrown lawn and looked at the ruined building. That had been a hell of a fire. Hutch touched his back, and Starsky jumped.

“She says this is definitely the address she got, but there might have been an error in the original trace. Worth trying again.”

“Yeah, okay. Hey, Hutch.”

“Mmm?”

“How many people you figure died in this fire?”

Hutch shrugged. “Why do you ask?”

“What if it’s ... a ... you know.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Starsky looked around again. The sun was setting, and the golden light made the burned out building look picturesque and peaceful. Behind the school was an open area -- maybe a football field once -- and a short row of houses on the other side of the field signaled the outskirts of suburbia.

“You’re sure it’s this address?”

“Obviously it’s not. Come on. We can’t learn anything more here.”

***

They dug up the records of the Campbell Academy. A fire in 1972 had taken out the main building and killed six people: a teacher, a fireman, and four teenage students. The school’s owners, inadequately insured, had declared bankruptcy, and the grounds had sat vacant ever since. Electric, phone, and water service had continued until the spring of 1973, perhaps while the facility was emptied of anything salvageable, but a few calls confirmed that the utilities hadn’t been working in years.

 _It was teenagers_ , Starsky thought.  _Not little kids_. But he wasn’t reassured. Mysterious voices that called for help and faded away -- a shiver grabbed his shoulders, and he straightened up quickly to camouflage it. Hutch remained still, poring over the thick file of clippings and records.

Starsky looked around the squad room, empty except for Martín, taking his lunch break. “Let’s let this rest and get back on the Agnelli murder, all right? There’s some --”

The phone rang, and Starsky froze.

Hutch raised his eyebrows. “I believe your ghost is calling.”

Starsky snarled at him and answered the phone. “BCPD. What?” Hutch put a hand over his mouth and smiled, then picked up the other line and began to trace the call.

It was the static, of course. Now it sounded like a fire to Starsky, cracking sounds and a harsh, high roaring. Behind it, crying. A little kid at the end of her rope. Starsky closed his eyes and pressed his fist against the desk until his knuckles burned.

A hand softly covered his, and Hutch took the receiver from him and gave his shoulder a squeeze. Martín had taken over the trace. Hutch listened for a moment, frowning.

Hutch spoke loudly: “Tell us where you are. Hello?” He waited. Starsky leaned his head closer in a wordless request, and Hutch tilted the receiver away from his ear so they could both hear the thin, tired-sounding sobs. After a few minutes, the static rose and drowned the voice, and then was abruptly gone. The dial tone was like an accusation.

Starsky took the phone from Hutch and hung it up. Hutch looked shocked, his eyes wide.

“You joke about ghosts now,” Starsky said. “You tell me that’s not something uncanny.”

Across the room, Martín’s chair screeched as he stood up. “Got that address for you,” he said, sounding pleased with himself. Starsky held Hutch’s gaze, ignoring Martín until he walked over to them and waved a sheet of paper in their faces. “Address? Hello, detectives?”

Hutch looked down. “Okay, Martín. What do you have for us?”

“It’s an address on the north side, an old business listing. Campbell something.” Hutch snatched the paper and looked at it.

“You’re sure they looked it up from scratch?”

Starsky interrupted them and steered Hutch toward the door. “We know where it is.”

***

Hutch had brought the file with them, and as Starsky drove, Hutch went through it again, news clippings and maps and summaries of tax records. He didn’t answer when Starsky asked if he had any ideas.

They pulled into the driveway of the main building and stared around. It was almost dark, and the windows looked blacker than before. Starsky turned in a full circle, taking in the fields behind the house, the tiny gatehouse behind them, not much more than a shed, pine woods to the east, and then the parking lot and the main building again.

Hutch walked down the length of the porch, looked in the window they’d used to access the building yesterday. “You think it’s squatters? Somehow got the phone line hooked up?”

“You saw this place. There wasn’t a stick of furniture anywhere, let alone phones.” Every room they’d been in had contained nothing but dust and sometimes a litter of twigs and leaves.

“Come to think of it, that’s a little odd,” Hutch said. “Why  _haven’t_  there been squatters? Or partiers?” They looked at each other, and Starsky shivered again.

Rubbing the back of his neck, Starsky looked around. He stared past the fields for a few minutes and then jogged back to the car. He pulled open the passenger door and started rifling through the manila folder that Hutch had left on the seat. Yellowed clippings fluttered to the floor.

“What is it?” Hutch leaned into the car behind him and reached for the folder.

“Those houses,” Starsky muttered. “Why are they dark?”

Hutch said, “Here it is,” and spread out a brochure with a map of the school on the back. Starsky traced the lines marking the road, the main house -- and there it was, three dots on the far side of the sports field. “The school owned those houses too. Their phones might show up as this address.”

Starsky was already moving for the driver’s side, and Hutch grabbed the papers and got in. “Call it in, would you? I want some backup.”

“With floodlights,” Hutch agreed, picking up the radio.

***

“Dammit!” Starsky slammed the heel of his hand against the kitchen counter. He’d been so  _sure_. But the houses were empty and still, no sign of squatters. They were better maintained than the main building -- there must be some kind of contract to keep the lawns mowed and repair major damage. They’d had to jimmy the locks to get in.

Two of the houses were almost identical: small ranch-style houses with no basement. The third was larger and much finer, but it was just as deserted. The “downstairs” that Starsky had heard was their only clue, so they hunted through the basement for half an hour. The two uniformed officers who had joined them had brought better flashlights, and Hutch had even tapped the walls listening for hollow spaces behind them, but eventually they had to concede that it was simply a pair of empty, musty rooms.

The backup wanted to call it a loss and leave, but Hutch asked them to wait a few minutes while he and Starsky conferred. They stood in the kitchen, which seemed unusually large, stripped of appliances as it was. Hutch looked out the back door into the small yard, then stepped outside and shone the flashlight around. A tall board fence enclosed an area with a rusty swing set, a few overgrown bushes, and some low concrete structure. Hutch called Starsky over and pointed at it.

“Is that a well, do you think? Half-built barbeque, something like that?”

Starsky walked around it. There was a concrete cap at hip height, with two rebar handles. An iron lever set in the side stuck up a few inches, opposite two massive hinges.

“Hey. Hey.” Starsky grabbed Hutch’s hand holding the flashlight and shone it at the ground around them. He held it low and fanned it in a wide arc, and they both saw it: the dry grass was beaten down in a slight but definite path, from the side gate to where they stood. Starsky pushed at the lever and felt a slow grinding, then a smooth shift of some heavy mechanism under the concrete.

Hutch was looking at him questioningly. “It’s squatters, all right,” Starsky said. “Smart, lucky squatters.” He put a hand to one of the rebar loops, but Hutch held his wrist to stop him.

“What is this?”

“Fallout shelter, I think.”

Hutch stared at him in disbelief, then shook his head. “Only in California.” He drew his gun and nodded at Starsky.

The slab of concrete swung up easily. The lever must have moved a counterweight of some kind. It tipped over past ninety degrees, revealing what might have been a well about four feet in diameter. Metal rungs disappeared into the blackness.

Keeping the flashlight away from the opening, they listened. Starsky realized that on some level, he’d expected to hear the harsh static from the phone, but there was nothing. He found a chip of cement on the ground and dropped it down the hole, just as Hutch shouted a hello that echoed back to them.

They held their breath for a beat, and then there was a thump below them, and the wailing cry of a child afraid of the dark.

***

Ambulance lights splashed red and white into the back yard. Starsky was seated on the ground, next to the stretcher where Summer sat. She would talk to no one but Starsky, and now she was showing him some toy and chattering as if nothing had ever been wrong. Two heads of dark curls bent over a battery lantern and a bright pink baby doll. The paramedic had thought they could spare a few minutes yet before going to the hospital for a full exam.

Hutch moved a little closer, and Starsky looked up and nodded.

“Sweetheart, I’ve got to go. You’re going to go with Wendy now, okay?” Perkowitz crouched down and looked encouragingly at the little girl.

Summer asked Starsky, “Can you come with me?”

“Not right now. But I’ll see you soon. And you’ll be brave, right?” She nodded solemnly. “That’s my girl.” He stroked her hair and then turned and walked quickly to the shelter entrance. Hutch followed.

Starsky reached out to Hutch and clutched his jacket. “Christ, Hutch, I don’t want to go back down there.”

Hutch put a steadying hand on Starsky’s back. “She’s safe, Starsk,” he said quietly. “Probably won’t even remember this in a few months.” His mouth tightened on the lie, and he bent his head to touch Starsky’s. “Come on. Let’s go be cops.”

They descended the ladder and turned on the two battery lanterns they’d brought. The regular crime scene team would be here any minute, to take photos and dust for prints, so Starsky and Hutch poked around carefully, moving things aside with careful prods of a pen or fingertip.

There wasn’t much to see. The shelter was a simple concrete box, about ten feet by twelve. On the wall next to the ladder were built-in shelves that held some boxes of cereal and jugs of water. A bucket latrine was in one corner, and a metal table with a camp stove and a few magazines was in another.

At the foot of the ladder, a lamp with dead batteries and a small pile of clothes formed the nest where Summer had sat for five days. And across the room was the mattress where two adult bodies lay. Heroin overdose, or a bad batch, it looked like. They’d shot up and died, right in front of their kid, this sweet girl who had had to sit there until the lights went out, and then sit there longer. She’d never have had the strength or leverage to work the door from the inside. Summer’s fingers had been scraped raw.

Starsky leaned over the bodies. The woman hadn’t even gotten the needle out of her arm, and her face looked surprised. Starsky hoped it had hurt.

He straightened up and turned to Hutch, who was standing in the middle of the room, methodically looking around. He turned on the big flashlight to supplement the lanterns, and swept it from floor to ceiling, around every wall. Starsky followed his gaze. Together they moved the mattress a few inches back, which revealed only the cement wall meeting the cement floor.

Hutch switched off the flashlight and tapped it against his leg. Tap-tap-tap.

“What’s up?”

Hutch drew breath, but stopped short. Tap-tap-tap. He turned around in a circle again, looking for something.

“Come on, partner. Let me in.”

Hutch cleared his throat. “Starsky.  _Where’s the phone?_ ”

 

***

The End

***

  

 


End file.
